2 Boat Crash Victims Live To Tell Ordeal

A young woman from Highland, Ind., cheated death early Wednesday, surviving about eight hours in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan after a boat crash killed two people and left another missing.

Hours after the crash, the boat`s owner also was found alive and clinging to the side of the drifting craft.

After the powerboat in which she was riding crashed at high speed into an 8-foot, concrete breakwater outside Indiana Harbor, Carla Brouwenstyn, 21, swam from beneath the wreckage, grabbed two of her severely injured friends and held one woman`s head above water for nearly an hour, giving her mouth-to- mouth resuscitation in an unsuccessful attempt to keep her alive.

When the woman died, Brouwenstyn continued to hold her friend`s body while she desperately kicked to stay warm in the 52-degree water.

For the next five or six hours, Brouwenstyn, who described herself as a

``fair swimmer,`` held onto her friend`s body, kicked and tried to stay close to the breakwater to keep out of the current. She said she could not hang onto the wall because it was ``all slimy.``

``She`s a pretty strong girl,`` Brenda Brouwenstyn said of her sister, who is 6 feet 1 inch tall and weighs 200 pounds. ``I never would have made it.``

``I kept telling myself there`s no doubt in my mind I`d make it,``

Brouwenstyn said.

Rescue officials called the survival of Brouwenstyn and another member of the boating party a miracle and Brouwenstyn`s effort to save her friends heroic.

``She`s an amazing woman,`` said Deputy Chief Angelo Machuca of the East Chicago Police Department. ``I don`t know if I would have stayed there to do that.``

Brouwenstyn was rescued about 6:30 a.m., when two fishermen heard her screams for help and pulled her, blue and numb, from the water-but only after Brouwenstyn made them promise not to let go of the body of her friend, Rhonda Russell, 21, of Hammond.

``When we got to her, we told her to let go of the rope (which was attached to the body),`` said Robert Storca of East Chicago, one of the fishermen. ``She said, `No, if I let go she`ll go down.` ``

Storca and Dennis Scott, also of East Chicago, finally pulled Brouwenstyn into their boat after tying the rope to their vessel, Storca said.

Brouwenstyn and Russell`s body were found about 50 feet from the breakwater into which their boat had crashed at about 40 miles an hour Tuesday night.

Hours later a fisherman spotted the overturned wreckage of the boat about five miles northeast of the crash site. A Coast Guard helicopter rescued the boat`s owner, Gary Gaskin, 25, of Hobart, who was clinging to the side. The boat`s driver, John Clifford, 25, also of Hobart, was found dead in the demolished prow.

The search by divers for a fifth victim, Christine Mason, 21, of Hammond, was called off Wednesday afternoon after Brouwenstyn said the severely injured woman sank into the lake.

Brouwenstyn was taken to St. Catherine Hospital in East Chicago, where she was in serious but stable condition with broken ribs and cuts on her feet, hands, leg and chest, according to a hospital spokeswoman. Gaskin was in St. Mary`s Hospital in Gary, also in serious but stable condition with head injuries, according to a spokeswoman.

From her hospital bed, Brouwenstyn gave this account of the night`s events:

About 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, she and three coworkers from Montgomery Tank Co. in Gary-Mason, Russell and Gaskin-set out from Portage in Gaskin`s recently purchased, 23-foot powerboat for a pleasure ride to Chicago. They were joined by Clifford, a friend of Gaskin`s.

Shortly before 10 p.m., as they passed East Chicago, the boaters decided to turn around because it was late. As they made their way back past Indiana Harbor, the boat hit the breakwater wall along the Inland Steel Co. property. Though four flashing red lights alert boaters to the lengthy wall, according to Fred Maldonado, chief warrant officer for the Coast Guard, area boaters said the boat hit an area that was not near the lights.

``If you don`t know (the breakwater) and you`re running fast at night, there`s no way you could have seen it,`` said Keith Frum, whose father owns Lefty`s Coho Landing in Portage, one of several marinas along the Indiana lakeshore. ``If you don`t know navigation, and most people don`t, you think it`s a way into the harbor.``

But he said if the driver believed he was near the harbor entrance, he should have been going much slower. ``The law is: idle at night. No wake,``

Frum said. ``There`s a reason for it.``

Brouwenstyn told her rescuers that the accident ``happened so fast I don`t know what happened. There was a huge impact. I felt my shoes fly off.`` After coming up from beneath the wreckage, Brouwenstyn spotted a large chair cushion floating nearby, grabbed it and called for the other women to come and hold on. They did, but then ``started getting panicky,`` Brouwenstyn said. ``I tried to settle them down. I kept saying, `Calm down, relax and we`ll be fine.` But they kind of lost it`` and tipped over the cushion several times.